100 Favorite Dishes: No. 7, Texas Shrimp Chaat at Pondicheri

​This year leading up to our annual Best of Houston issue, we're counting down our 100 favorite dishes in Houston. This list comprises our favorite dishes from the last year, dishes that are essential to Houston's cultural landscape and/or dishes that any visitor (or resident) should try at least once.

The Texas shrimp chaat was one of the first menu items that caught my eye here, a dish that beguiles by eagerly and effortlessly combining Texan ingredients into a staple Indian snack. The triangles of buttery avocado called to mind guacamoles past, while the fat Gulf shrimp was rubbed down with cumin -- among a blend of other spices -- to tie the two cuisines' flavor profiles neatly together, both Indian and Tex-Mex at once. On a bed of puffy sev, it's a trademark dish that perfectly encapsulates what Jaisinghani had hoped to achieve with her new "fusion" restaurant.

I put "fusion" in quotes, however, because to simply categorize the food here with such an overused, ambiguous term is hardly fair. Fusion implies a certain overexertion, a certain forced marriage between normally incompatible cuisines or flavors. At Pondicheri, the blend of Texan and Indian is entirely innate -- owing to Jaisinghani's deep roots in both cultures -- and seems to come as naturally as breathing.

Breathing is a good way to describe the restaurant, too, which hums with life and vibrancy in its way. That vibrancy can get a little loud at dinner, but it's hard to be annoyed when you look around Pondicheri's full dining room to see an army's worth of people from every walk of life fixing this Indian-Texan restaurant with an easy embrace that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.

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